In galleries and living rooms, on trains and trams and buses, mysterious scenes are briefly illuminated, their occupants caught in "some small act" or dream – in the National Gallery a gardener steals part of a still-life canvas to replant in his own...

"I do not say you are it, but you look it, and you pose at it, which is just as bad", Lord Queensbury challenged Oscar Wilde in the courtroom – which erupted in laughter – accusing Wilde of posing as a sodomite. What was so terrible about posing as a...

At the turn of the fifteenth century, private devotionals became a speciality of the renowned Ghent-Bruges illuminators. Wealthy patrons who commissioned work from these artists often spared no expense in the presentation of their personal prayer boo...

A good novel brings to life not only the nature of its characters, but also the physical presence of all of the things surrounding them, from the smallest trinkets to entire landscapes".Object Lessons" explores this phenomenon and addresses a fundame...

"The Odyssey" reveals a universal order where gods intercede in the destinies of men, heroes are both deceitful and brave and a sea voyage becomes a test of human ingenuity and endurance. Following the fall of Troy, Odysseus sets sail for home. But b...

First published in 1994 to a storm of controversy, Thanassis Valtinos's probing novel Orthokosta defied standard interpretations of the Greek Civil War. Through the documentary-style testimonies of multiple narrators, among them the previously unhear...

"Born too late to see the war and too early to forget it". So writes Reiner Schurmann in "Origins", a startlingly personal account of life as a young man from postwar Germany in the 1960s. Schurmann's semi-autobiographical protagonist is incapable of...

In this bold study, Edna Aizenberg offers a much-needed corrective to both Latin American literary scholarship and popular assumptions that the whole of Latin America served as a Nazi refuge both during and after World War II. Analyzing the treatment...

"Objects as Actors" charts a new approach to Greek tragedy based on an obvious, yet often overlooked, fact: Greek tragedy was meant to be performed. As plays, the works were incomplete without physical items in the form of theatrical props. In this b...

The first novel Anthony Powell published following the completion of his epic "A Dance to the Music of Time", "O, How the Wheel Becomes It!" fulfills perhaps every author's fantasy as it skewers a conceited, lazy, and dishonest critic. A writer who a...